Google Adsense: The Best Places to Put Ads on Your Site

When it comes to monetization, ad placement is definitely important. I've heard from many people that after changing their ad placement, earnings went up significantly.

Update: As Mandi so wisely pointed out in the comments below, and I completely failed to specify in the post here, this mainly applies to PPC/CPC ads (Paid Per Click or Cost Per Click) where you get paid when people click. (Read my Affiliate Marketing Explainedposts for more about ads.)

Here's a handy tool from Google that gives you a good idea of the best places to put ads on your page.

This is called a heat map. The darker the orange, the best spot for ads (in general).

My tips:

1. Your ad placement must work well with your design. Garish, gaudy or assaulting is never good.
2. Your ad placement must not turn off your users. This is a delicate balance and you won't please everyone. You'll need to experiment to see what works for you.
3. Just because a spot is bright orange doesn't mean you should put an ad there. Ad-heavy sites are a drag to visit. Too many ads will work against you in the long run.
4. Don't make it hard to find your real content among your ads.
5. Be careful about how many ads you place above the fold. Google recently announced that sites with a lot of ads above the fold won't rank as highly:
   

   Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

6. Not sure what's "above the fold" on your site? Here's a tool that will tell you.
7. As always, experiment, experiment, experiment. These are general guidelines to get you started but take note of what your readers seems to respond (and not respond) to.

Read More

Blogger Adsense: Tips to avoid google adsense banned

As many of you already know, Google Adsense is the most popular and generous advertisment service from Google that gives you recurring income. However, some people don't bother to read the Adsense policies and they usually violate AdSense Terms and conditions without knowing and as a result, later to find out that their accounts have been disabled. Many times, fraud clicks are the main cause. But there could be many other reasons for an Adsense account to be disabled.

So, if you want to keep your Google Adsense account safe, please read and keep in mind the following rules:

1. Never use adult, violent or advocating racial intolerance content on your site.
2. Never copy paste any article from any other website. Google can easily find out which one is original.
3. Never click on your own ads. Google can analyze all the clicks made on your ad units.
4. Never place above your Adsense ad units texts like "Click on ad below", "Please click below" etc. instead you can use label headings as "sponsored links" or "advertisements".
5. Never say your friends to click on your ads on social networking websites like Facebook
6. Don't put unwanted links, pop-ups on your website. Keep interface quite neat and clean with proper navigation and all. Google also looks for the quality standard of websites.
7. You must have a privacy policy page which must contain a description about the use of Google AdSense on your website. This is the latest policy introduced by Google. Many webmasters don't know about it which results in their account getting banned.
8. Hide Adsense ad units from Contact and Privacy Policy page (read here to see how you can do that) Place ads only on Content Pages. Advertisers pay only for content based ads.
9. Never display Adsense ads in floating boxes with images or texts that could overlap or cover the ads. However, you can use floating text, images on your website under the condition they don't play with your Adsense ads.
10. Never place more than 3 ad units and 3 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page.
11. Do not confuse with adjacent images - It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. Read more about this here
12. Do not send your Google adsense ads code to anyone.
13. Never place your Google ads any unit under any drop down menu, if you do so you are Violate Google Adsense TOS.
14. Never place Adsense ads on empty pages (pages with no content), pop-up pages, error pages, contact forms or registration pages.

These rules are the minimum requirements for maintaining an AdSense account in a proper way.
Whenever needed, it is better to ask for adsense help from the learned staff of Google Adsense. At least, you'll get authorized and very helpful tips from them! Good luck and be wise :)

Read More

Blogger Adsense: Google Adsense Optimization Tips

What is Google AdSense? 

Google AdSense is a free program run by Google that allows you to display Google adverts on your blog/website and pays you everytime someone clicks on one of these ads. Just submit your blog to Google for approval and after your content has been approved, you are ready to place AdSense ads on your website.  But beware, Google AdSense doesn't approve any sites! According toAdSense policy you are not allowed to do the following things:

1) Do not click on your own AdSense ads by any way.
2) Do not increase AdSense ad impressions with some automating tools.
3) Don’t ask others to click on your ads.
4) Don’t alter the AdSense code other than fonts and colors.
5) Don’t put AdSense code on adult or prohibited content.

Some basic optimization tips can double your AdSense revenue, so i've added a list of some of the best Google Adsense Tips and Tricks for making more money from the Google Adsense program.

Tips to Increase Google AdSense Earnings

1) Place the Adsense ads above the main fold that user can see your ad units without scrolling down on your site. This will increase your Ads Click Through Rate (CTR)

Because browsers and screen sizes vary, Google has created a nice tool that allows you to enter any URL, and check whether you've implemented your ads above the fold.

2) The best performing ad units for AdSense are:

250×250 Square
160×600 wide skyscraper
336×280 large rectangle
300×250 medium rectangle

Use them wisely. I suggest you to place 250 x 250 size ad units at the top of every post and align it at the right or left side of the post content. The 160×600 ad format can easily fit in the sidebar of your blogger blog.

3) You can use the following “heat map” provided by Google to analyze other top performing ad placement slots. You should concentrate on the areas with darker orange color which represents the hot spots of the ads slots. (see in the image below)

4) Text ads are good for the first Google Ad unit. I also recommend you to place a 300×250 unit in the sidebar (or somewhere below the fold) – these generally serve CPM based ads and will help you monetize visits from places like Digg and StumbleUpon.

5) Ads placed in-between the content can also perform well. If you have small posts then put ads at the top of the page content. If you have big post then ad units placed at the bottom or middle of the post. 

6) Do not use borders to your text ads or use them wisely. 

7) To blend, choose the colors that match with the colors of your website: for example if your site background is black, you will put the same background for your Adsense ads. If your links are blue, then select the color blue for Adsense links. If your titles are red, then make your Adsense block titles red. 

8) To complement, use colors that already exist on your site, but don't match the background and borders exactly where the ads are placed.

9) To contrast, choose colors that stand out against the background of your site. Contrasting is recommended only for sites with dark background, so we suggest using an ad style with white background, white borders, and blue titles. (google hints)

10) Use link units near the site navigation bar. The main advantages of this placement, are that they can perform well and you don't need too much Ad space on your site. This way, your site looks clean and also, your visitors will be annoyed.

11) Study your keywords and the target ads to these keywords. Usually, Google Adsense crawler searches for the first or second paragraph to target ads to that page so don't forget to add your page-targeted keywords at the beginning of your post. 

12) MFA (made for AdSense) sites are websites created around AdSense keywords, and often, these are poor quality sites with little or no original content. Use Allow and block ads feature to block low paying or irrelevant ads showing on your site. And be careful when you're doing this, sometimes one ad unit can give you $0.01 in one country and $1 in other country. 
14) Many times you can earn you more AdSense revenue from Image search engines than with the regular web traffic. Upload good quality images and use text captions with alt tags to make sure that blog images rank good in Image Search results.

15) Add a search box at the top left region of your blog and use the word "search" in the submit button otherwise visitors might be confused and might not notice it. If you use a second search box, put it at the bottom of your pages.

If you have any other suggestions, write a comment below.
Good luck!

Read More

Blogger Adsense: 10 common places to put Ads in website or Blogger

This article will discuss about the more common 10 places on our blog where we can place ads and about how to implement them and also which are the most suitable formats based on those available in our AdSense account.

Advertisements

In the Sidebar

How to implement.

This is one of the easiest places to place AdSense. Just go to the page elements (layout), click on the "Add a Gadget" link and add an HTML/Javascript widget with your ad code inside it or add directly an AdSense widget.

Recommended formats: 125 × 125, 120 × 600 and 160 × 600

Between posts

Implementation. You can implement AdSense ads between your posts: go to Layout, click on the "Edit" link below the Blog Posts section, then check the "Show Ads Between Posts" option.

Recommended formats: 468 × 60, 300 × 250 and 336 × 280

Under the header

Implementation:

Firstly, convert your AdSense ad code. You can use this converter here:
AdSense Ad Converter

Then, go to your Blogger Template (from your Dashboard, click on Template and press the Edit HTML button) and search for:

<div id='header-wrapper'>

Then paste the converted code right after it.

Recommended formats: 728 × 90 and 728 × 15

Above the blog posts

Implementation:

Convert your ad code and search for <div id='main-wrapper'> in your template.

Paste the converted code right after it.

Recommended formats: 460 × 68, 468 × 15 and 336 × 280

Under the title of the post (this will be visible on all the pages)

 Implementation:

Convert your AdSense ad code and then go to your Template, Expand Widget Templates and look for:

<div class='post-header-line-1'/>

Note: if you can't find it, search it without the ending slash /

Paste the converted code right after it.

Recommended formats: 468 × 68 and 468 × 15

Under the post title (visible only on the posts pages)

Implementation:

Convert your ad code and then go to your Template, Expand Widget Templates and look for:

<div class='post-header-line-1'/>

Note: if you can't find it, search it without the trailing slash /

Paste the converted code, following this example:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>

<!-- Here your ad code -->

</b:if>

Recommended formats: 468x68 and 468x15

In the posts' footer 

Implementation:

Convert your ad code and then go to your Template, Expand Widget Templates and look for:

<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'/>

Note: if you can't find it, search it without the trailing slash /

Paste the converted code right after this line.

Recommended formats: 468x68 and 468x15

In the post's body (it will be visible on all pages)

Implementation:

Convert your ad code and then go to your Template, Expand Widget Templates and look for:

<div class='post-body entry-content'>

Note: in case you don't fint this code, search only for <div class='post-body'> 

And paste the converted code, following this example:

<div style='float:right'>

<!-- Here ad code -->

</div>

Recommended formats: 125x125, 180x150, 120x240 and 200x200

In the post's body (visible only in post pages)

Convert your ad code and then go to your Template, Expand Widget Templates and look for:

<div class='post-body entry-content'>

Note: in case you don't fint this code, search only for <div class='post-body'>  

And paste the converted code, following this example:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<div style='float:right'>

<!-- Here your ad code -->

</div>
</b:if>

Recommended formats: 125x125, 180x150, 120x240 and 200x200

Between post and comments (visible only on posts pages)

Implementation:

Convert your ad code and then go to your Template, Expand Widget Templates and look for:

</b:includable>
<b:includable id='commentDeleteIcon' var='comment'>

Paste the converted code just above it, following this example:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>

<!-- Here comes your ad code -->

</b:if>

Recommended formats: 468x60, 300x250 and 336x280

In the blog's footer

Implementation:

Convert your ad code and then go to your Template, Expand Widget Templates and look for:

<div id='footer-wrapper'>

Paste the converted code right after it.

Recommended formats: 728x90 and 728x15

FAQ

I anticipated some questions likely to arise:

I can't find the codes, what should I do?
Always check the "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox. These are the default codes of Blogger and should be found in all the templates unless they have been changed by a hack or the template designer.

Why should I convert my AdSense code?
The Blogger's Template reads it as text and not as code and it is good to avoid any errors when trying to save it.

The ads are not displaying properly, why is that?
The ads could be affected by the styles (CSS) selectors (divs) containing them and some templates could be wrong designed, then you should consider modifying these styles, look for another relevant place or in extreme cases, change the template.

Can I put the all 10 codes on my blog?
No, you should choose just one of the places where you want to put the ads considering that AdSense have some limits on the number of ads that could be displayed. Try to make a balance with your content.

Why we there should be only 3 ads displayed on the main page?
Is due to the limit set by the AdSense. Combine the type of ads (text, rich media ads and link units) to be able to show the number of ads you want.

Hopefully, this will be useful to those of you wanting to display AdSense ads on your blog.

Read More